submenu position error

Poster: ajosborne
Dated: Thursday February 2 2006 - 12:45:22 GMT

While testing my intranet site I have noticed a sub-menu reposition error. You can reproduce the error in the Milonic home page menu by...

Open the website.
Resize your window so that the right hand edge of your browser window is somewhere over the search menu item.
drop-down the support menu and hover over Tech Support Documents.
move the mouse to hover over Borders and then move back to hover over Tech Support Documents again.
The sub menu appears in one place and then jumps position when you move off that menu. The sub-menu has jumped 1 or 2 pixels left.
On subsequent attemps the first menu has actually moved relative to the sub-menu so you need to refresh the browser window to see the problem again. I don't know if the problem is the position of the sub-menu or the main-menu because both move under certain conditions. I suspect it is to do with calculating the position of the menu when it is constrained by the right hand margin of the browser window and maybe related to the size of the menu outline shadow...perhaps.

Is this a bug?

Regards, James.

Poster: vikenk
Dated: Thursday February 2 2006 - 15:32:52 GMT

Hi James,

Yes, I can confirm that behavior. It happens to me too.

Go to http://www.ssaes.org/test_site_2

From the main menu go to "Elementary School", then "English Curriculum". On the right side "Related Links" menu go to "Other Grades". You will see the same phenomenon.

When you hover in and out of the submenu, you get a 2px "hop". It disappears after the first instance and doesn't happen again until you reload the page.

I'm not sure if this is a menu bug but I have been aware of this behavior for some time.

I don't know what the fix is, but I wanted to let you know that you're not the only one.

Poster: Migru
Dated: Thursday February 2 2006 - 16:18:58 GMT

Hi

i don´t think it is the menu, i think its IE..........!!!

Michael

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Thursday February 2 2006 - 16:45:19 GMT

Well, I'll put my 'think' here. I think it's the built-in anti-collision of the menu when the drop down is so close to the browser window edge, and the menu has not yet fully loaded yet when moused over. I could only reproduce the behavior if I moused over the menu before the page was finished loading, then it occurred in both IE and FF. If I then cleared cache and loaded the pages and waited until it was fully loaded that never happened.

Ruth

Poster: ajosborne
Dated: Thursday February 2 2006 - 17:18:52 GMT

Well I have re-tested in firefox and on my site there is no problem with the menu boxes moving. However ff doesn't show the menu box shadow either so it kind of avoids the problem rather than not exhibiting it. I have to use IE as it is the company standard (which I set) and many other things depend upon it (which I don't have control over).

On a couple of occasions I have seen the menu boxes doing strange moves in ff, but this has not been reproducable in a consistent manner.

I don't think it relates to the menu file not fully loading because on my Intranet site the problem goes on as often as you want to move the mouse backwards and forwards over the links provided you get the sub-menu to disapper and then re-appear (gets pretty tedious but I've gone up to about 20 repetitions... and the problem is 100% consistent).

James.

Poster: Ruth
Dated: Saturday February 4 2006 - 0:37:31 GMT

Hi,

Sorry, I don't know what's causing it since I don't see it if the page and menu are fully loaded. You said something about the box shadow, I guess you mean the IE overfilter. Have you tried blocking that out and see if it still happens? Maybe it's something with that overfilter setting.

Ruth

Poster: ajosborne
Dated: Monday February 6 2006 - 10:48:45 GMT

Hi Ruth,

I have no idea what an overfilter is. I certainly haven't decalred one. I am refering to the menu box outline shadow that appears to the bottom and right edge of the menu box (...to make it look 3d). This is 'enabled' by default on the milonic home menu and my intranet which is altered very little from that.

... Just looked in the menu_data.js code and there is an overfilter statement which mentions 'shadow'. I will play with that...

YES That's it!
If you remove the shadow then the problem goes away. There must be some slight pixel arithmetic errors that cause this effect when a shadow is used, perhaps not taking into account the size of the shadow under certain calculations. However the menus look far better with the shadow so I'm going to leave it in for the moment. Shadow(color=#777777', Direction=135, Strength=3).

This is confirmed by changing the size of the shadow. The bigger the shadow the bigger the menu jump. I'll leave it at the deafult 3 pixels.

Thanks, James.